Philip K. Dick Goes Legit With Library of America Canon

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Philip K. Dick Goes Legit With Library of America Canon

Illustration by Riccardo Vecchio __With the Library of America's __publication of Philip K. Dick: Four Novels of the 1960s — edited by Jonathan Lethem, whose own early fiction owes a lot to Dick's — the most outré science fiction writer of the 20th century has finally entered the canon. The Man in the High Castle, Dick's coolly rendered imaginings of Japanese-Nazi confrontation in occupied America, was his breakthrough work. The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch and Ubik established him as one of the most hallucinatory yet insightful critics of late-capitalist American civilization. And Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? inspired the film Blade Runner. Wired caught Lethem as he was promoting his latest novel, You Don't Love Me Yet, to ask about this sanctification of Dick's oeuvre — or as Lethem calls it, his "irv."

Lethem: For a great writer, the marginal stuff should be available — and Dick's a great writer. But because he was so prolific, the masterpieces now nestle up alongside books that Dick himself might have been horrified to see back in print. You cringe on behalf of the potentially receptive reader who comes away with Dr. Futurity or The Cosmic Puppets.

Wired: What was it that made his early works so bad?

Lethem: He was expending his energies on these unpublished realist novels. What happened with The Man in the High Castle was that he invigorated his science fiction with all the ambition he'd been reserving for his mainstream efforts. Suddenly, he vaulted up to this other level.

Wired: You discovered him as a teen?

Lethem: I found a copy of Ubik in a used bookstore. That changed my life. It was a book-length metaphor for feelings that were churning within me. Turning the pages — all epiphany, all the time.

Wired: Do you think Dick would have been better received if he were writing today?

__Lethem:__It's easy to say he'd be Don DeLillo, but he's so deeply of his time. And I don't think it's an accident that he was so marginal. There was something about him that was deeply fugitive. It's hard to believe in a Dick who's been domesticated into a life of literary prestige the way we are currently domesticating him.